How to obscure logos in video with Premiere Pro

There are some instances when a videographer needs to obscure a logo or face in their footage. Learn how to handle this task in Premiere Pro.

Ant Pruitt

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In today's world of elevated privacy and trademarking, video footage could be denied public viewing. Or, you could face legal ramifications for showing something in your footage without expressed written permission.

Identify and mask the subject

First, determine the problem area in your video footage. Sometimes it's a logo; other times it may even be a person's face. The technique to blur and obscure an object or face is all the same. In this instance, we'll use a T-shirt logo as an example.

Inside of Premiere Pro, navigate to the problem area on your timeline.

Duplicate the footage simply by holding your ALT (option on Mac) key and drag the footage up above to another track. The duplicate layer (Figure A) is needed because you're going to mask out all of the other areas of the footage, but keep the problem area visible. Trust me, it sounds counter intuitive, but it works.

Figure A

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Next, make sure you select your duplicated layer and then navigate to your effects controls panel.

There, you'll see an opacity effect labeled "fx Opacity." This effect allows you to create a mask with an ellipse or polygonal shape, or you can just use the pen tool and draw a free-hand mask. For this example, we'll use the ellipse mask because the logo is round.

When you click the ellipse mask, you may need to resize it to fit properly over the piece of footage. Just use your mouse to drag the ellipse where it needs to be. Also, click on the ellipse mask points to help resize it. Be sure to set the mask feather (Figure B) to 30 pixels.

Figure B

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Next, navigate to your effects panel (Figure C) and search for blur. This will display a list of blur types available in Premiere Pro. I recommend using the Camera Blur or the Gaussian Blur. I will use Gaussian blur in this example. Just drag the effect onto the duplicated footage in the timeline.

Figure C

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Inside of the effects control (Figure D), you can adjust how much or how little blur you'd like to add to the clip. Because we used a mask, only the duplicated footage is affected. It's a pretty cool effect until you hit play on your video. Especially if the object being obscured is moving in the clip. Fear not, there's a fix for that.

Figure D

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Premiere Pro has a pretty amazing motion tracker built into it. This motion tracker is attached to the "Mask Path" parameter of your ellipse mask. When you have the mask applied, make sure your playhead is set where it needs to be in the timeline. Then press the play icon on the motion tracker (Figure E). Premiere Pro will start loading a motion tracker dialog box. During this process, Premiere Pro will set keyframes indicating where the mask will be positioned in the footage. When the tracker is completed, you playback your footage to verify the mask properly tracked over the duration of your footage. If it misses the mark a little, just pause your footage and reposition the mask.

Figure E

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Depending on how much movement is in the footage as well as the contrast, this could become a tedious task. The tracker does really well when there's more contrast in the footage and the mask is large enough. It's a tough task when trying to track smaller objects with lower contrast. When you task is completed, your footage will have a blurred object as expected (Figure F).

Final View

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Premiere Pro does a great job obscuring objects in videos. Granted, After Effects has a great tool for content-aware fill that could do a great job, too. But, if you're a Premiere Pro user, give this technique a try and see if you can obscure a person's face or a logo.

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By Ant Pruitt

Ant Pruitt is an IT Support Professional with a passion for showing the non-geek how great technology can be. He writes for a variety of tech publications and hosts his own podcast. Ant is also an avid photographer and weight lifter.

Full Bio

Ant Pruitt is an IT Support Professional with a passion for showing the non-geek how great technology can be. He writes for a variety of tech publications and hosts his own podcast. Ant is also an avid photographer and weight lifter.